Keeper of the Clown Bell

Don't you love farce? Did you honestly think the Keeper of the Clown Bell was going to let the death of Stephen Sondheim pass without comment? Not a chance of that happening but, as is customary in polite society, if you’ve got something unpleasant to say about someone who  just kicked the bucket then give it a week or two before hurling your insults. In the case of Sondheim I am understandably restrained in my pronouncements because his lyric “isn’t it rich?” has been a tagline of the KOTCB blog since 2004 so I owe him (as do we all) a debt for composing the Clown World anthem in that pivotal year of 1973. “ Send in the Clowns ” moaned forth from the Broadway stage in the  year of  the disposable lighter  and  Sleeper  prescience or, put another way, the waning of the  Evel era  when the celebrated master reinvented the American musical by adapting a 1950’s Scandinavian art house flick into “ A Little Night Music .” On that last point I should pause and declare that I am by temper